State-national entitlement programs compete with the family as an organizing principle.

For nation-states to triumph over linguistic, ethnic, and religious differences, they had to outlaw the existing competitive economic, education, cultural, and social systems to replace them with centralized, progressive programs.

It is totally zany for conservatives to claim that they are both ‘pro-family’ (whatever that means) and in favor of these types of programs, because those programs were and are intended to weaken the hands of religious organizations, families, and ethnic organizations.

In FDR’s announcement speech to the public in 1935, he said:

Today a hope of many years’ standing is in large part fulfilled. The civilization of the past hundred years, with its startling industrial changes, has tended more and more to make life insecure. Young people have come to wonder what would be their lot when they came to old age. The man with a job has wondered how long the job would last.

This social security measure gives at least some protection to thirty millions of our citizens who will reap direct benefits through unemployment compensation, through old-age pensions and through increased services for the protection of children and the prevention of ill health.

We can never insure one hundred percent of the population against one hundred percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-ridden old age.

This is portrayed as if it were an unavoidable fact, like the weather, that the centralized industrial system out-competed the older system of home economics in a vacuum. It was more the long result of a series of ‘reforms’ and social changes intended to bring about that end to create  a more rational, egalitarian society. State-managed electrification, collectivization of agriculture, and many other socialistic and quasi-socialistic policies were pursued both during the New Deal and before that time with the express goal of melting down what had been a rather diverse country into a single nationalistic unit, bound together through national compulsory education and into a highly regulated workforce.

What really happened during the New Deal tends to be papered over so much that almost everything written about it for contemporary consumption is a lie.

The suite of entitlement programs and regulations put into place before, during, and after the New Deal have all been dedicated to the weakening of the family system and the strengthening of the nation-state and the corporate systems that feeds resources and manpower into it in a rationalized fashion.

What this has generated is a society in which parents do not feel as if they own their children. They instead prepare their children for success in the corporate state, rather than preparing them to bring honor and wealth to their families. This cuts people off from their own long term interests, and cuts parents off from the long term interests of their children. The concept of self-ownership becomes fuzzy in the minds of the masses, because they were never really owned by anyone — from cradle to grave, they go through bureaucratic systems, under no-one’s control.

No one is the keeper of anyone else, so the people tend to bounce around aimlessly, without much direction, degrading with each successive generation, as people turn to self-destruction rather than caring for the culture. Because it’s not their culture, it’s just some place in which they find themselves, in which they are tenants and never owners.

Protestantism made its mark on the world in part due to its superior productive powers that began to really take off following the 30 Years’ War. The decline of Spain and later the Habsburg Empire, followed by the rises of Germany, England, and the other northern European states marked a major change in the character of European civilization and the nature of work.

The Protestant Work Ethic, as understood by Max Weber, has since come to fade, along with Protestantism more generally. More congregations have either become indistinguishable from secular progressives, or have otherwise ceased to even continue to exist.

What has replaced it, at least in spiritual similarity, is the TED revivalist sentiment towards work. TED actually stands for:

Technology
Entertainment
Design

Perhaps not so oddly enough, these are the areas in which Americans are supposed to be working in, the occupations that are the high-status occupations, none of which involve much of any physical labor. Instead, all that work has to do with the mind and the spirit, without getting ones’ hands dirty.

The old industrial economy, in a previous eruption of spiritual concern with the environmentalist movement, was deemed impossibly sinful. This is one of the reasons why much of it, at least in terms of manpower intensive work, has been sent overseas: it has less to do with real efficiency, and more to do with regulatory arbitrage and tax efficiency. It’s better to manage those enormous factories overseas in China because the laws and some other factors make it tougher to do in the US and in other European countries.

Young progs, unlike the old prots, will declare themselves wholly dedicated to their work, which they are ‘passionate’ about, and which they consider to be a sacred ‘mission’ guided by a ‘vision’ from their corporate leader, with a motivation beyond money. They are screened for this sort of language at university and by interviewers, who are keen to sift out unbelievers who might just be looking for a good job that will help them bring some money home for the missus and the little ones.

Protestants believed that, through disciplined work, they glorified God. They did not believe that gleaming ikons glorified the trinity, but they did think that hard work and frugality did.

TED revivalists believe that, through innovative mind-work, they glorify the world through good works, with no special divine mission. Their demonstrated ecstasy, passion, and belief in their corporate mission is what glorifies them, and perhaps the company that they work for, giving their employer’s logo a special kind of spiritual numina.

Any material or familial obligations have been mostly forgotten. In fact, if you’re multiple-times TED speaker Elizabeth Gilbert, part of what you glorify is your abandonment of your family obligations, and your pursuit of self-glorification, rather than bringing glory to God.

Christopher Lasch might say that this is another indicator that the better sorts of person have put an image of themselves up as an object of worship, rather than a God: a rather odd form of idolotry. At least worship a cow or a pig. Much less unseemly.

The TED congregants already believe that they are among the Elect, behaving and speaking as if they know that whatever they do, they have already achieved salvation, because they know they’re among the good and beautiful people. It is this self-obsessed vanity that leads to their countless errors, and will undo everything that they have worked for. It would be nice if it could be described as a tragic flaw, but it’s really more accurate to call it a comic flaw.

They glorify false images of themselves at the expense of what their real selves might have been, always eager to appear selfless through gross acts of self-absorbtion, eager to be seen doing good works for faraway strangers while abandoning the people closest to them.

Charles Hughes Smith is one of my favorite long-term blogger-turned-authors, and he had an excellent post earlier this week about multinationals, credit markets, and its impact on the careers and life choices of typical people.

The second factor is the status quo grants all the advantages to global corporations and the central state.The mechanisms used to enforce these advantages are both numerous and well-masked. One is cheap, limitless access to capital–what I call free money for financiers. Imagine how many profitable assets you could buy if you too could borrow $1 billion at .25% interest from the Federal Reserve or another central bank.

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Once you can access unlimited nearly-free capital, it’s a snap to buy political influence, at which point the state (government) enforces your monopoly/cartel on the populace as rule of law. And we all know what happens if you challenge the state: you are targeted for marginalization, impoverishment and trumped-up Kafkaesque charges.

Given all these advantages, Corporate America and the State can afford to pay those who pledge their fealty far more handsome sums than can typically be earned outside these fortified fiefdoms. Above the entry level, Corporate America and the State both pay far in excess of the median wage in salary and benefits, and in the security promised to government employees.

It’s not that difficult to earn $60,000 or more in government service (remember to include all the bennies–healthcare, vacation, personal days off, sick leave, pensions, etc.) and Corporate America pays its managerial/technocratic class very well.

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But there is a cost to this sacrifice of one’s working life and fealty. It’s difficult to put a price tag on it, but for most of us it’s a significant sum–often hundreds of thousands of dollars over a lifetime. For those who can’t stomach the absurdity of spending their lives in service to these fiefdoms, it’s not really a choice; it simply isn’t an option.

This is also why hard money systems would be so disruptive. Part of what makes multinationals so competitive, despite all their other problems, is access to cheap credit at scale. While it is possible to compete with them in the dollar system, it’s only really possible to do that once you gain full access to the regulated capital markets.

Access only ceases to be competitive when the currency stops being competitive, and the state that manages that system loses the strength to continue handling its financial obligations. The nation-state and the corporate system that grew out of it were a definite break with the independent economic tradition of family-owned enterprises. It’s also coincident with the compulsory education system, which breaks the natural affinities and economic connections between parents and children.

The nation-state economic system encourages people to drop their natural loyalties and to surrender them to bureaucratic ones, on the theory that it’s more efficient. If it really were more efficient in an economic sense, it would not need the enormous subsidies represented by the enormous soft money apparatus.

Corporations today struggle with the same things that the state struggles with: breakdowns in loyalty and trust, which it must ironically overcome with endless streams of propaganda, which exist to make the characters of brand marketing as more real and readily identifiable than folk heroes and family members.

This breakdown in trust is likely to be epoch-marking, and it may not be as simple to bridge as some seem to think.